I know I’m beating a dead horse, but when people talk about the d20 glut, in my opinion they are mostly talking about the garbage produced by Jim Ward’s “Fast Forward Entertainment”. It seems for every awesome book put out by great d20 publishers like Green Ronin or Fantasy Flight Games, Jim had his finger in another stinker. I hate to speak ill of one of the founders of the industry and the writer of one of my all-time favourite games, but I haven’t found anything in the FFE catalogue that had any really redeeming qualities. And this is from a guy who thinks that Everquest d20 was pretty good.

So today I’m pulling out one of the less stinky items in the list – the Devil’s Player Guide. Throughout FFE’s marketing material (and on the pictures on their website) it is called the Devil Players Handbook except of course that the d20 license doesn’t allow the use of those words. The book itself is a collection of rules for running a campaign with devils as the main characters – with rules for all the major devil types (and a few new ones) for races (with ECLs ranging from +1 for the vast majority of things like Imps, Kytons, Erinies and so on, to +3 for Pit Fiends and Gelugons) as races, and variant character classes that are essentially slightly modified core classes (Combat Mage, Devil Bard, Diabolic Druid, Diabolic Fighter, Diabolic Mage, Diabolic Monk, Diabolic Rogue… yeah, lots of imagination here).

To make my devilish PC I have to pick a race first of all, and I’ll go with the mighty Gelugon – the ice devils. And I’m going to make him twice – once at level 1 to see what an adventurer version of an ice devil is like, and then tomorrow I’ll advance him to level 12 for use as a mighty NPC villain.

I’ll go for an ice devil ranger, err, a Gelugon Diabolical Warder. I’ll use the elite array for ability scores, putting the lowest stat in Strength, which would be a bad choice for most rangers, but with a +10 racial bonus to Strength, I’m not too concerned (Str: 8, Dex: 15, Con: 14, Int: 10, Wis: 13, Cha: 12). After throwing in the Gelugon racial mods it looks a bit better:

Strength 18 (+4)

Dexterity 15 (+2)

Constitution 20 (+5)

Intelligence 16 (+3)

Wisdom 21 (+5)

Charisma 16 (+3)

His other Gelugon abilities are pretty potent too… +1d8 hit points at level 1, +1 hit point per level thereafter, natural armor +3, base speed of 40′, natural weapons (2 1d4 damage claws, 1d6 damage bite, 1d4 damage tail) and he speaks Infernal, Celestial and Draconic. With his +3 Int bonus I’ll add Abyssal, Common and the secret tongue of the Krellickan Ice Worms to his languages. He also starts with the Devilish Qualities feat and four additional devilish feats for his race, separate from the 2 devilish feats and 2 regular feats he gets for being a level 1 devil character (the game replaces the standard level-up table for D&D with one with a pile more feats, more stat boosts, and size boosts at levels 6, 12 and 18). Many of the key racial abilities of the various devil types are available here as feats – so I can make Fruzek a mishmash of Ice Devil and… Kyton! Dancing Chains gives him Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Chains) as a free feat, and a bunch of the Kyton’s abilities, albeit at a lower power level for now. I’ll also grab Devil Spell-like Abilities (minor), giving him the ability to use Charm Person, Invisibility and Darkness once per day per point of Cha bonus. The last two go into boosting his Natural AC, and giving him regeneration. His two devilish feats for being level 1 go into DR 2/+1 and devilish speed.

As a 3.0 rule book, the Warder gets the Ranger’s two weapon fighting abilities without the option of going for other combat styles. So be it. For his level 1 feats I grab Improved Initiative and Iron Will (prereqs for the Uncanny Alertness feat from AEG’s “Feats”). For his Prey Mastery (slightly changed from Favoured Enemy), he goes with Lawful Outsiders – making him effective against other Devils as well as many Celestials. A nice pick.

The final product is Fruzek Wingcutter, who is currently a fairly capable spiked-chain wielding adventurer, certainly on par with a level 4 character (which is what his +3 ECL would indicate). He would actually be kind of fun to play in an adventure, although his uber-high ability scores make him a bit potent.